


hypnotherapist

by lesbianfrodobaggins



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Fix-It, M/M, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), and also about the power of love and friendship, and yes i mean EVERYONE lives, messing with timelines and settings just a little bit, writing IT fic is about bringing Georgie back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-27 03:50:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20753873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianfrodobaggins/pseuds/lesbianfrodobaggins
Summary: Eddie had missed them. He had loved them recklessly and without aim for so long.I want,he thinks,more time. I want more time.In which Eddie is the one who gets caught in the deadlights.





	hypnotherapist

**Author's Note:**

> what if... you were writing an everyone lives/nobody dies reddie fic... and you took the Richard Siken "tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again" quote literally... haha just kidding... unless?

It hurts when it rushes back to him. It’s not the lights—weaving and blinking and blurring in and out of his vision—that pain every inch of him, that curl his toes and pulse excruciatingly somewhere in the back of his head. It’s memory.

Well, it’s both. Richie had always called him a little bitch about these things.

Eddie registers, distantly, that he’s in danger; if he really tries, he can feel the push and pull of the battle around him, the dark dim of the lair and the gush of air as it breathes somewhere nearby, foul and damp. There’s something else, too—Richie, maybe, many feet below him, not yammering away now but yelling. Eddie can make out the contours of these words, something distressed and aching, but they dam up in the shell of his ear and drip away like rainwater.

Rainwater.

Here’s the thing: he doesn’t want to let go of this feeling, not just yet.

There’s the swirl of the lights, yes, and the pain leaking through him and surely onto the ground, onto Richie, onto his friends—wherever they are—but there’s this now: there’s rainwater.

Rainwater.

Then the boat.

The taste of the air at the funeral, thick with grief and horror.

Then the bitter taste of sweat and grease from the kiss, soft and furtive and sad, he had pressed into Bill’s dirty hair as he cried on the couch under the sickly glow of the TV—Bill next to Eddie next to Stan next to Richie next to Beverly next to Mike next to Ben and then all of them pressed so tightly together they could be breathing the same air, building worlds out of grief just between them, just between seven pairs of hands, just between seven matching sets of ugly scars.

_Oh, yeah._ Eddie had missed them. He had loved them recklessly and without aim for so long. _I want,_ he thinks, _more time. I want more time,_ and his chest burns with it.

It’s less the sensation of falling and more the knowledge of falling that he registers. Absence then presence. Nothing then something. Ceiling of demon clown lair, floor of demon clown lair—and Richie’s arms, too, with Richie attached to them, wrapped up in the scent of demon clown and the musk of that shitty deodorant that Eddie had told him contains far too much aluminum to be safe for the human body. “Oh,” he says, when he notices his lacerated arm, and Richie pulls him even closer.

“It’s dead,” Richie tells him, hands shaking. “It’s dead for real this time.”

That’s when the lake starts screaming.

***

The water seems to boil and convulse as body after body after body sits up to hack up water, standing on trembling legs and shivering in the cold light, finally shedding the last horrible death-wails that had been left stuck in their chests. There are dozens of them, dozens and dozens of bodies writhing in the lake and they cannot be anything other than a last cruel trick. They’d killed it. That should have been it.

Then a flash of kind brown eyes. Damp, curly hair, a ginger set to the shoulders. “Fuck, man, it’s Stan,” Richie says—hoarse, breathless, clutching Eddie tighter—mere moments before Bill breaks off at a sprint, falling to his knees before a familiar figure standing at the edge of the lake, yellow raincoat, impossibly young. 

“Billy?” Georgie is saying. “Bill? I want to go home. Take me home.” Even at a distance it’s clear that Bill is crying in earnest, smaller hands in his larger, grimy ones, and nodding in place of the words he cannot get out. Mike has reached Stan now, taking him by the shoulders and enveloping him in a hug so tight that it’s just as likely to kill him again as anything else. _ Just like he was as a kid. A little taller, a little sadder, a little more world-weary, a little happier._

The gray in Bill’s hair, the cuts on Stan’s wrists. They’ve all grown into their grief differently. They shouldn’t have had to.

“This could be a trick,” Eddie points out, struck by mourning as soon as the words are out of his mouth. Something tight wrenches in his chest and he swipes at his eyes furiously as the echoes of the deadlights dance in his vision.

“No,” Richie breathes. “No, it’s not. They’re real. I know it, asshole. Don’t… don’t say that.”

“And me?”

“Hm?” 

“Me. What about me, shithead? I can’t get these fucking lights out of my eyes, I don’t even know if I’m real. Shitty way to go out, right behind fucking your mom.” The joke doesn’t land like he hopes; Richie looks stricken.

Richie closes his eyes, takes a moment. “I can’t believe that an ‘I fucked your mom’ joke was almost the last thing you said to me. God, you fucking asshole. You fucking _asshole,_ Eds.” 

They breathe in silence for a few bare seconds. Richie doesn’t ask for an apology; Eddie doesn’t give one. They both know that it was always going to take this. 

“You didn’t answer my question.”

When Richie opens his eyes and looks at him, there’s something in them so stark and bleak and hopeful that Eddie has to look away. He’s hoping it’s love. He’s going to call it love—twenty-seven years’ difference hasn’t softened that sting at all. 

Richie makes an abortive movement towards Eddie’s face, and then drops his hand with an exhausted, hangdog expression. Eddie’s blood is still on his glasses and there’s still twenty-seven years and a wife and a million unspoken things between them. He brings a hand to Eddie’s cheek anyway—consequences be damned—and settles a thumb in the deep laughter lines at the side of his mouth. 

Blood on his glasses; slightly askew. Tired eyes. A childhood memory resurfacing: a glasses lens falling out of the frames to rest at the bottom of their lake, Richie’s panic. _I can reach them Rich just wait one fucking second you dumbass you can’t even see without your glasses how do you think you’re going to find a clear lens at the bottom of a fucking lake._ The teasing peck Richie had left on his cheek when he had emerged, lens in hand, complaining about brain-eating bacteria. _Thanks, Eddie Spaghetti. Should I propose now or wait until I have the ring?_

“You think I wouldn’t know you?”

Eddie lets out a shuddering breath. “Take me home, Rich.”

“Yeah, Eds. I will.”

***

They all part ways eventually; of course they do. It’s no sad affair—there’s raucous thumps on sore backs and ribbing aplenty. There is no fear of forgetting or being forgotten; there is only, as far as the Losers are concerned, time to breathe easy for the first time in a long, long time.

“Hey, Bev, if you don’t put a ring on it soon, I might just have to propose to your man myself. Ben, you are under strict instructions to carry the ring around and propose at the same time or some other cute bullshit or I will _not_ show at the wedding, okay?” 

Beverly, warm and fond: “I don’t recall inviting you in the first place, Trashmouth.”

“And you, Mike, don’t tell any of your grad school friends about me, okay? You librarian motherfuckers are scary. Either say nothing or I want them to leave cutting, well-worded one-star reviews of my Netflix specials on letterboxd. Gotta stay humble.”

Ben and Bev to each other. Stan back to Patty for an overdue vacation. Mike to Florida and grad school. 

“Well,” Bill is saying, “Georgie and I are going to—”

“Therapy,” Richie finishes for him. “You’re going to therapy, dude.”

“Don’t joke, Richie, I’ve seen your google calendar. Fridays at 1:00, asshole. I can read." 

There’s a smattering of laughter. Richie is sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, Eddie seated beside him. The back is stuffed with luggage; Bill has just shoved the last of their many, many bags—mostly Eddie’s—into Richie’s tiny trunk. He joins the rest of the group crowded around Richie’s window. 

The sky is beautiful, hazy and gray. It’s going to rain soon; Eddie loves the rain. He reaches over to grab Richie’s hand, settled on the gearshift. He will not miss this place. He won’t allow himself to. 

_Eddie, baby, what are the odds that I open this suitcase and it’s just entirely filled with inhalers?_

_None, dickwad. What are the odds that I open your suitcase and it’s entirely full of male enhancement pills and pictures of your mom?_

_First of all, gross._ A goofy leer. _Second of all, you’ve got those pills to thank for last night._

“Do you think that group therapy over Skype is a thing yet?” Stan muses. 

“Already asked,” Beverly says. “Dr. Johnston says good luck finding anyone that will put up with Richie and Eddie’s verbal hatefucking.”

“Hey! It’s not hatefucking if it’s loooooove,” Richie tells her, and Eddie thumps him on the shoulder as hard as his bandaged arm will permit at the sound of Richie’s self-satisfied sniggering. Beverly shuts the car door directly in Richie’s face. He rolls down the window and she stoops to plant a kiss on his forehead.

“Hey. You two be happy, okay?”

“Yeah, Bev. We will.”

*** 

The hotel key does not work the first time. They’re forced to go back down to the lobby, let the lady in front do her thing, stand there like a pair of horny teenagers and twiddle their thumbs for about ten minutes straight. Eddie is positive that he is going to die if he does not get his hand in Richie’s pants very fucking soon. 

Richie has told the hotel employee that they are married.

“Are you and your husband planning on doing anything exciting while you’re here, Mr. Tozier?”

“No, no. Just hanging out for a few days before we move along. We both needed a break.”

The moment their room door opens, Eddie’s mouth is ghosting along Richie’s neck, his ear, his stomach. “Let me at least lock the door, asshole,” Richie says, breaking away. A resounding thud as the bolt slides into place—and then Eddie has Richie under his hands, Richie on the itchy sheets, his hands under his shirt, muscles jumping under his fingertips. _I haven’t even checked for bed bugs,_ he thinks, before that thought is cut short by the feeling of Richie’s mouth at the ditch of his elbow. 

“Gotta say, Eds, I was expecting you to be more—”

“If you finish that thought, I am sending you to bed without getting any, jackass,” Eddie warns, and then gracelessly shoves his hand into Richie’s boxers. 

“Yeah, okay,” Richie says, drawing a shallow breath, “come here,” and he grabs Eddie’s face and drags him down to his level so that their noses brush. Eddie has always loved his eyes. Memories are still resurfacing now and again—it’ll be awhile before they both get them all back. One spins like a leaf on the surface of a glassy lake across his mind now: socked feet in his face, the ropes of the hammock creaking with the weight of them both, studying Richie’s face as he stared down at his comic book. “Gonna be kissing you until the end of fucking time, Eddie Spaghetti. We’ve got a lot of years to make up for,” Richie says, and then makes good on his promise.

***

“Hey, Eds?”

“Hm, Rich.” A statement, not a question. They’ve got the AC cranked low. Eddie’s drawing circles on the sensitive patch of skin between Richie’s shoulder blades. 

“What did you see in the deadlights? You came out of it by yourself, you know." 

There’s a gust of warm breath across Eddie’s ear—Richie has turned onto his side to face him. Eddie considers for a moment. 

“I saw us as kids. All of us.”

“Oh.” A beat. “Not so bad, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know how we all made it here, Eds.” They have the blackout curtains down. Somewhere down the hall a heavy, obnoxious bass to some song thumps, and it reverberates in their dark room.

“I didn’t want to leave you all. I wanted to stay, Rich. I wanted to stay so badly.” For a moment they’re children again, all seven of them, washed out in the glow of the TV on Bill’s living room couch. “I couldn’t leave.”

“Good fucking news, Eddie Spaghetti. You don’t have to go anywhere.” The TV, the tired taste left in his mouth at 4:00 am after a night spent laughing, the popcorn they’d all frantically pick out of Bill’s couch in the morning before his parents found out. 

“Yeah, baby,” Eddie says, pulling the blankets up to his chest, plucking Richie’s glasses off of his face and placing them on the nightstand, planting one more kiss on his jaw, the circling lights in his eyes settling warmly in his chest. “I know.”

He flicks the nightstand off. He stays.

**Author's Note:**

> spare comments... spare comments?? also about the title... I think I'm funny. follow me on tumblr @dearladydisdains


End file.
